I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project:

TeamHome.app – An internal company directory designed for remote teams. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Read on for details & some background…

Below is an internal team post I wrote to help us at Close.io do a better job of capturing customer’s feature requests in a way that leads to better product development outcomes.

I’m sharing this publicly because I believe this advice can help other startups and SaaS product companies as well.

When a customer request for a new feature come in, it’s easy to not log it at all (“we’ve heard that one before”) or to log it in a suboptimal way. Here are a few details on how to best capture customer needs and why it matters.

The typical, but unhelpful, way

The most common way feature requests are logged is in a “light” format like this:

A common pattern in SaaS apps is to allow a free trial period of 2 weeks or 1 month, and then to require a credit card to use it any longer.

Either out of curiosity or out of a genuine need for a tool that some SaaS service is offering, I will often sign up for a free trial soon after learning about it in order to check it out. For a variety of reasons by the time the free trial is up, I’m not ready to purchase.

It could be because I was just poking around. But more often it’s because I got too busy. Or my reason for signing up didn’t stay a high enough priority to be ready to purchase and fully implement some solution. Or maybe because the product just wasn’t far enough developed to satisfy what I was looking for.

What I find happening is that 3, 6, 12, or 18 months later I’ll find myself thinking about this tool. Perhaps the problem that led me to originally check out tools of the service has become more pressing than ever before. Or perhaps I’m fed up with another tool I chose, and am searching again for a better option. Or I’m hoping that the product has evolved more. Or whatever.

When logging back into your previously-created account, what you typically see is something like this:

What makes a new feature or product update “done” versus what makes it “really done”? At  Close.io we developed our own process to answer this question, based on years of shipping new features for our sales communication platform. Today, we want to share this checklist with you.

Startup engineering teams face many decisions about what to build. At Close.io, many areas compete for the focus of our small engineering team. Customers often have one little thing they really need. Our team envisions the next big thing to move the product forward. There are poor UX workflows to optimize. We have an idea on how to grow our customer base faster. And of course there are always bugs to fix. The list is endless!

A small engineering team doesn’t have the time or resources to regularly improve every part of a product. It’s not uncommon for a section of an app, once launched, to remain untouched for a year or longer. We usually work to solve a problem or empower customers in a new way or fix a pain point, and then we move on to something else.

One reason I believe our super small team at Close.io has been successful is that we often solve multiple problems at once. When a feature needs to be built, we often expand the scope a bit to include other related problems or features that naturally go together with the first one.

One of my tweets is featured in an article on Mention.com:

How Close.io Closed $585 in Monthly Revenue from 1 Tweet.

Check it out!

In doing product management on an engineering-led project, GitHub Issues rock. The killer features are that it’s a) really simple, b) tightly integrated with code (you can reference/close issues via commit messages), and c) facilitates discussion of issues just like it does of code.

What GitHub Issues suck at is being able to get a high-level view, where you can see more than 30 issues at a time, and broken out by milestone or by person. (You can only filter to see issues for one milestone or one person, but not easily move multiple issues between them.)

I’d really like to see a Trello-style interface for managing GitHub Issues. Some very limited integrations exist, but what I’m looking for would let you quickly move issues around between milestones. This would help plan a product roadmap and be able to visualize what the upcoming milestones look like in one place.

Read the rest of this entry »

I watched Jeff Veen’s “Designing for Disaster” talk (below) and took away a couple of parts that I thought were really good. Some notes:

How to do Product Reviews (can be design, product, process, anything) — making an objective process out of something that is very subjective.

• Optional attendance, but mandatory participation (keeps everyone focused)
• Not a forum for expressing opinions
• Rather, a place to solve problems.
• Define in the beginning if session is supposed to be divergent or convergent.
• Divergent –  I want as many ideas to solve this problem as possible – let’s talk about everything; brainstorming
• Convergent – Evaluating feasibility, acknowledge constrains. Drive towards consensus.